V. I. Lenin

Economics And Politics In The Era
 Of The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat

Written:30 October, 1919First Published:PravdaNo. 250, November 7, 1919. Published according to the manuscriptSource:Lenin’sCollected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 30, pages 107-117Translated:George HannaTranscription/HTML Markup:David Walters & Robert CymbalaCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of theGNU Free Documentation License

I had intended to write a short pamphlet on the subject
    indicated in the title on the occasion of the second anniversary
    of Soviet power. But owing to the rush of everyday work I have so
    far been unable to get beyond preliminary preparations for some of
    the sections. I have therefore decided to essay a brief,
    summarised exposition of what, in my opinion, are the most
    essential ideas on the subject. A summarised exposition, of
    course, possesses many disadvantages and
    shortcomings. Nevertheless, a short magazine article may perhaps
    achieve the modest aim in view, which is to present the problem
    and the groundwork for its discussion by the Communists of various
    countries.

Theoretically, there can be no doubt that between capitalism
    and communism there lies a definite tranition period which must
    combine the features and properties of both these forms of social
    economy. This transition period has to be a period of struggle
    between dying capitalism and nascent communism—or, in other
    words, between capitalism which has been defeated but not
    destroyed and communism which has been born but is still very
    feeble.

The necessity for a whole historical era distinguished by
    these transitional features should be obvious not only to
    Marxists, but to any educated person who is in any degree
    acquainted with the theory of development. Yet all the talk on the
    subject of the transition to socialism which 

      we hear from present-day petty-bourgeois democrats (and such, in
      spite of their spurious socialist label, are all the leaders of
      the Second International, including such individuals as
      MacDonald, Jean Longuet, Kautsky and Friedrich Adler) is marked
      by complete disregard of this obvious truth. Petty-bourgeois
      democrats are distinguished by an aversion to class struggle, by
      their dreams of avoiding it, by their efforts to smooth over, to
      reconcile, to remove sharp corners. Such democrats, therefore,
      either avoid recognising any necessity for a whole historical
      period of transition from capitalism to communism or regard it
      as their duty to concoct schemes for reconciling the two
      contending forces instead of leading the struggle of one of
      these forces.

In Russia, the dictatorship of the proletariat must inevitably
    differ in certain particulars from what it would be in the
    advanced countries, owing to the very great backwardness and
    petty-bourgeois character of our country. But the basic
    forces—and the basic forms of social economy— are the
    same in Russia as in any capitalist country, so that the
    peculiarities can apply only to what is of lesser importance.

The basic forms of social economy are capitalism, petty
    commodity production, and communism. The basic forces are the
    bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie (the peasantry in particular)
    and the proletariat.

The economic system of Russia in the era of the dictatorship
    of the proletariat represents the struggle of labour, united on
    communist principles on the scale of a vast state and making its
    first steps—the struggle against petty commodity production
    and against the capitalism which still persists and against that
    which is newly arising on the basis of petty commodity
    production.

In Russia, labour is united communistically insofar as, first,
    private ownership of the means of production has been abolished,
    and, secondly, the proletarian state power is organising
    large-scale production on state-owned land and in state-owned
    enterprises on a national scale, is distributing labour-power
    among the various branches of production and the various
    enterprises, and is distributing among the working people large
    quantities of articles of consumption belonging to the state.

We speak of “the first steps” of communism in
    Russia (it is also put that way in our Party Programme adopted in
    March 1919), because all these things have been only partially
    effected in our country, or, to put it differently, their
    achievement is only in its early stages. We accomplished
    instantly, at one revolutionary blow, all that can, in general, be
    accomplished instantly; on the first day of the dictatorship of
    the proletariat, for instance, on October 26 (November 8),1917,
    the private ownership of land was abolished without compensation
    for the big landowners— the big landowners were
    expropriated. Within the space of a few months practically all the
    big capitalists, owners of factories, joint-stock companies,
    banks, railways, and so forth, were also expropriated without
    compensation. The state organisation of large-scale production in
    industry and the transition from “workers’
    control” to “workers’ management” of
    factories and railways— this has, by and large, already been
    accomplished; but in relation to agriculture it has only just
    begun ("state farms”, i.e., large farms organised by the
    workers’ state on state owned land). Similarly, we have only
    just begun the organisation of various forms of co-operative
    societies of small farmers as a transition from petty commodity
    agriculture to communist agriculture.[1]The same must be said
    of the state-organised distribution of products in place-of
    private trade, i.e., the state procurement and delivery of grain
    to the cities and of industrial products to the
    countryside. Available statistical data on this subject will be
    given below.

Peasant farming continues to be petty commodity
    production. Here we have an extremely broad and very sound,
    deep-rooted basis for capitalism, a basis on which capitalism
    persists or arises anew in a bitter struggle against
    communism. The forms of this struggle are private speculation and
    profiteering versus state procurement of grain (and other
    products) and state distribution of products in general.

To illustrate these abstract theoretical propositions, let us
    quote actual figures.

According to the figures of the People’ s Commissariat
    of Food, state procurements of grain in Russia between August 1,
    1917, and August 1, 1918, amounted to about 30,000,000 poods, and
    in the following year to about 110,000,000 poods. During the first
    three months of the next campaign (1919-20) procurements will
    presumably total about 45,000,000 poods, as against 37,000,000
    poods for the same period (August-October) in 1918.

These flgures speak clearly of a slow but steady improvement
    in the state of affairs from the point of view of the victory of
    communism over capitalism. This improvement is being achieved in
    spite of difficulties without world parallel, difficulties due to
    the Civil War organised by Russian and foreign capitalists who are
    harnessing all the forces of the world’s strongest
    powers.

Therefore, in spite of the lies and slanders of the
    bourgeoisie of all countries and of their open or masked henchmen
    (the “socialists” of the Second International), one
    thing remains beyond dispute—as far as the basic economic
    problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat is concerned, the
    victory of communism over capitalism in our country is
    assured. Throughout the world the bourgeoisie is raging and fuming
    against Bolshevism and is organising military expeditions, plots,
    etc., against the Bolsheviks, because it realises full well that
    our success in reconstructing the social economy is inevitable,
    provided we are not crushed by military force. And its attempts to
    crush us in this way are not succeeding.

The extent to which we have already vanquished capitalism in
    the short time we have had at our disposal, and despite the
    incredible difficulties under which we have had to work, will be
    seen from the following summarised figures.

    The Central Statistical Board has just prepared for the press
    data on the production and consumption of grain—not for the
    whole of Soviet Russia, but only for twenty-six gubernias.

The results are as follows:

Thus, approximately half the amount of grain supplied to the
      cities is provided by the Commissariat of Food and the other
      half by profiteers. This same proportion is revealed by a
      careful survey, made in 1918, of the food consumed by city
      workers. It should be borne in mind that for bread supplied by
      the state the worker paysone-ninthof what he pays the
      profiteer. The profiteering price for bread isten
      timesgreater than the state price; this is revealed by a
      detailed study of workers’ budgets.

A careful study of the figures quoted shows that they present
    an exact picture of the fundamental features of Russia’s
    present-day economy.

The working people have been emancipated from their age-old
    oppressors and exploiters, the landowners and capitalists. This
    step in the direction of real freedom and real equality, a step
    which for its extent, dimensions and  rapidity is without parallel
    in the world, is ignored by the supporters of the bourgeoisie
    (including the petty-bourgeois democrats), who, when they talk of
    freedom and equality, mean parliamentary bourgeois democracy,
    which they falsely declare to be “democracy” in
    general, or “pure democracy” (Kautsky).

But the working people are concerned only with real equality
    and real freedom (freedom from the landowners and capitalists),
    and that is why they give the Soviet government such solid
    support.

In this peasant country it was the peasantry as a whole who
    were the first to gain, who gained most, and gained immediately
    from the dictatorship of the proletariat. The peasant in Russia
    starved under the landowners and capitalists. Throughout the long
    centuries of our history, the peasant never had an opportunity to
    work for himself: he starved while handing over hundreds of
    millions of poods of grain to the capitalists, for the cities and
    for export. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat the peasantfor the first timehas been working for himself andfeeding better than the city dweller. For the first time
    the peasant has seen real freedom—freedom to eat his bread,
    freedom from starvation. In the distribution of the land, as we
    know, the maximum equality has been established; in the vast
    majority of cases the peasants are dividing the land according to
    the number of “mouths to feed”.

Socialism means the abolition of classes.

In order to abolish classes it is necessary, first, to
    overthrow the landowners and capitalists. This part of our task
    has been accomplished, but it is only a part, and moreover,notthe most difficult part. In order to abolish classes
    it is necessary, secondly, to abolish the difference between
    factory worker and peasant, to makeworkers of all of
    them. This cannot be done all at once. This task is
    incomparably more difficult and will of necessity take a long
    time. It is not a problem that can be solved by overthrowing a
    class. It can be solved only by the organisational reconstruction
    of the whole social economy, by a transition from individual,
    disunited, petty commodity production to large-scale social
    production. This transition must of necessity be extremely
    protracted. It may only be delayed and complicated by hasty and
    incautious administrative and legislative measures. It can be
    accelerated only by affording such assistance to the peasant as
    will enable him to effect an immense improvement in his whole
    farming technique to reform it radically.

In order to solve the second and most difficult part of the
    problem, the proletariat, after having defeated the bourgeoisie,
    must unswervingly conduct its policy towards the peasantry along
    the following fundamental lines. The proletariat must separate,
    demarcate the working peasant from the peasant owner, the peasant
    worker from the peasant huckster, the peasant who labours from the
    peasant who profiteers.

In this demarcation lies thewhole essenceof
    socialism.

And it is not surprising that the socialists who are
    socialists in word but petty-bourgeois democrats in deed (the
    Martovs, the Chernovs, the Kautskys and others) do not understand
    this essence of socialism.

The demarcation we here refer to is an extremely difficult
    one, because in real life all the features of the
    “peasant”, however diverse they may be, however
    contradictory they may be, are fused into one whole. Nevertheless,
    demarcation is possible; and not only is it possible, it
    inevitably follows from the conditions of peasant farming and
    peasant life. The working peasant has for ages been oppressed by
    the landowners, the capitalists, the hucksters and profiteers and
    bytheirstate, including even the most democratic
    bourgeois republics. Throughout the ages the working peasant has
    trained himself to hate and loathe these oppressors and
    exploiters, and this “training”, engendered by the
    conditions of life,compelsthe peasant to seek an
    alliance with the worker against the capitalist and against the
    profiteer and huckster. Yet at the same time, economic conditions,
    the conditions of commodity production, inevitably turn the
    peasant (not always, but in the vast majority of cases) into a
    huckster and profiteer.

The statistics quoted above reveal a striking difference
    between the working peasant and the peasant profiteer. That
    peasant who during 1918-19 delivered to the hungry workers of the
    cities 40,000,000 poods of grain at fixed state prices, who
    delivered this grain to the state agencies despite all the
    shortcomings of the latter, shortcomings fully realised by the
    workers’ government, but which were unavoidable in the first
    period of the transition to socialism—that peasant is a
    working peasant, the comrade and equal of the socialist worker,
    his most faithful ally, his blood brother in the fight against the
    yoke of capital. Whereas that peasant who clandestinely sold
    40,000,000 poods of grain at ten times the state price, taking
    advantage of the need and hunger of the city worker, deceiving the
    state, and everywhere increasing and creating deceit, robbery and
    fraud—that peasant is a profiteer, an ally of the
    capitalist, a class enemy of the worker, an exploiter. For whoever
    possesses surplus grain gathered from land belonging to the whole
    state with the help of implements in which in one way or another
    is embodied the labour not only of the peasant but also of the
    worker and so on— whoever possesses a surplus of grain and
    profiteers in that grain is an exploiter of the hungry
    worker.

You are violators of freedom, equality, and
    democracy—they shout at us on all sides, pointing to the
    inequality of the worker and the peasant under our Constitution,
    to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, to the forcible
    confiscation of surplus grain, and so forth. We reply—never
    in the world has there been a state which has done so much to
    remove the actual inequality, the actual lack of freedom from
    which the working peasant has been suffering for centuries. But we
    shall never recognise equality with the peasant profiteer, just as
    we do not recognise “equality” between the exploiter
    and the exploited, between the sated and the hungry, nor the
    “freedom” for the former to rob the latter. And those
    educated people who refuse to recognise this difference we shall
    treat as whiteguards, even though they may call themselves
    democrats, socialists, internationalists, Kautskys, Chernovs, or
    Martovs.

Socialism means the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of
    the proletariat has done all it could to abolish classes. But
    classes cannot be abolished at one stroke.

And classes stillremainandwill remainin
    the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship
    will become unnecessary when classes disappear. Without the
    dictatorship of the proletariat they will not disappear.

Classes have remained, but in the era of the dictatorship of
    the proletariateveryclass has undergone a change, and
    the relations between the classes have also changed. The class
    struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the
    proletariat; it merely assumes different forms.

Under capitalism the proletariat was an oppressed class, a
    class which had been deprived of the means of production, the only
    class which stood directly and completely opposed to the
    bourgeoisie, and therefore the only one capable of being
    revolutionary to the very end. Having overthrown the bourgeoisie
    and conquered political power, the proletariat has become therulingclass; it wields state power, it exercises control
    over means of production already socialised; it guides the
    wavering and intermediary elements and classes; it crushes the
    increasingly stubborn resistance of the exploiters. All these arespecifictasks of the class struggle, tasks which the
    proletariat formerly did not and could not have set itself.

The class of exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, has
    not disappeared and cannot disappear all at once under the
    dictatorship of the proletariat. The exploiters have been smashed,
    but not destroyed. They still have an inter national base in the
    form of international capital, of which they are a branch. They
    still retain certain means of production in part, they still have
    money, they still have vast social connections. Because they have
    been defeated, the energy of their resistance has increased a
    hundred and a thousandfold. The “art” of state,
    military and economic administration gives them a superiority, and
    a very great superiority, so that their importance is incomparably
    greater than their numerical proportion of the population. The
    class struggle waged by the overthrown exploiters against the
    victorious vanguard of the exploited, i.e., the proletariat, has
    become incomparably more bitter. And it cannot be otherwise in the
    case of a revolution, unless this concept is replaced (as it is by
    all the heroes of the Second International) by reformist
    illusions.

Lastly, the peasants, like the petty bourgeoisie in general,
    occupy a half-way, intermediate position even under the
    dictatorship of the proletariat: on the one hand, they are a
    fairly large (and in backward Russia, a vast) mass of working
    people, united by the common interest of all working people to
    emancipate themselves from the landowner and the capitalist; on
    the other hand, they are disunited small proprietors,
    property-owners and traders. Such an economic position inevitably
    causes them to vacillate between the proletariat and the
    bourgeoisie. In view of the acute form which the struggle between
    these two classes has assumed, in view of the incredibly severe
    break up of all social relations, and in view of the great
    attachment of the peasants and the petty bourgeoisie generally to
    the old, the routine, and the unchanging, it is only natural that
    we should inevitably find them swinging from one side to the
    other, that we should find them wavering, changeable, uncertain,
    and so on.

In relation to this class—or to these social
    elements—the proletariat must strive to establish its
    influence over it, to guide it. To give leadership to the
    vacillating and unstable—such is the task of the
    proletariat.

If we compare all the basic forces or classes and their
    interrelations, as modified by the dictatorship of the
    proletariat, we shall realise how unutterably nonsensical and
    theoretically stupid is the common petty-bourgeois idea shared by
    all representatives of the Second International, that the
    transition to socialism is possible “by means of
    democracy” in general. The fundamental source of this error
    lies in the prejudice inherited from the bourgeoisie that
    “democracy” is something absolute and above
    classes. As a matter of fact, democracy itself passes into an
    entirely new phase under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and
    the class struggle rises to a higher level, dominating over each
    and every form.

General talk about freedom, equality and democracy is in fact
    but a blind repetition of concepts shaped by the relations of
    commodity production. To attempt to solve the concrete problems of
    the dictatorship of the proletariat by such generalities is
    tantamount to accepting the theories and principles of the
    bourgeoisie in their entirety.

    From the point of view of the proletariat, the question can be
    put only in the following way: freedom from oppression by which
    class? equality of which class with which? democracy based on
    private property, or on a struggle for the abolition of private
    property?—and so forth.

Long ago Engels in hisAnti-Dühringexplained
    that the concept “equality” is moulded from the
    relations of commodity production; equality becomes a prejudice if
    it is not understood to mean theabolition of
    classes. This elementary truth regarding the distinction
    between the bourgeois-democratic and the socialist conception of
    equality is constantly being forgotten. But if it is not forgotten
    it becomes obvious that by overthrowing the bourgeoisie the
    proletariat takes the most decisive step towards the abolition of
    classes, and that in order to complete the process the proletariat
    must continue its class struggle, making use of the apparatus of
    state power and employing various methods of combating,
    influencing and bringing pressure to bear on the overthrown
    bourgeoisie and the vacillating petty bourgeoisie.

[This article remained
	unfinished—editor]

October 30, 1919

[1]The number of “state farms” and “agricultural communes” in Soviet Russia is, as far as is known, 3,536 and 1,96l respectively, and the number of agricultural artels is 3,696. Our Central Statistical Board is at present taking an exact census of all state farms and communes. The results will begin coming in in November 1919.